On Stage, and Off

By Bruce Weber

Published: April 22, 1994

On Finding Just the Right Ending

The 50th anniversary of Arthur Miller's debut on Broadway was celebrated on Wednesday with a noon reception in the downstairs lounge at the Booth Theater. The occasion was a modest acknowledgment of the achievement of a playwright who has seen 12 of his plays in Broadway houses since "The Man Who Had All The Luck" opened -- and closed, after five performances -- at the Forrest Theater in November 1944.

"I decided I'd never write another play after that," Mr. Miller, who is 78, told a gathering of a few dozen friends (and about as many photographers) while he blinked at flashbulbs.

Mr. Miller's 13th Broadway play, "Broken Glass," which opens at the Booth on Sunday, is a drama about a Jewish couple in Brooklyn in 1938 whose marriage and faith come under scrutiny when a well-meaning doctor begins treating the wife for a psychosomatic paralysis. An untidy work ("full of ambiguities," is Mr. Miller's phrase), the play is largely without action, aside from the slow skinning of the characters.

"It's a dialectic, if you want to use a high-class word," Mr. Miller said in an interview. "It's very internalized. And I've respected its ambiguities."

In especially chewy roles for actors (Ron Rifkin and Amy Irving are Phillip and Sylvia Gellburg, David Dukes the doctor), the clues to the characters' lives unspool through dialogue rather than event.

"It's written in what I conceive to be a series of blows," he continued. "You get struck by one succeeding blow after another."

And yet the playwright had a tough time getting the blows to land. In the final scene of the recently published version of the play, Phillip collapses with heart failure and Sylvia, who has been unable to use her legs, suddenly stands.

"I'm all right, Phillip!" she shouts. "Can you hear me?" The play ends before the audience knows whether Phillip responds.

But this is not what's now onstage. During the play's pre-Broadway run in March at the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven, the fate of Phillip Gellburg, an American Jew tormented by his Judaism (the play takes place as the Nazis are rising in Europe) changed several times. The current ending, fixed now for about two weeks, won't be divulged here, but in different versions since the original, Phillip has both lived and died.

"The play came out of the dark, and seeing it set up in the daylight, so to speak, I saw things I could do better," Mr. Miller said. "As we went along, I tried to listen to the play and what it was telling me. It's tougher on Phillip now because he sees his limitations. In the first version, there was less of that, but in watching the play, I saw he was being confronted by what was destroying him, and so I allowed him to acknowledge that in the course of the production."

"It was a case of my acting as a writer and a listener," he continued. "And what I heard is what you see onstage now. Most of the time I've gone through this stage of writing before we got into rehearsal. This time I didn't."

So is he satisfied? Are changes still to come? The answer had 50 years of experience in it: "The point comes where the ship has a bow and the stern and sides and a deck. So you launch it. And it either sinks without a trace, or it floats." Rebutting Pulitzer Perceptions

An aggrieved Anna Deavere Smith spoke vehemently this week about the perceptions of her work that surfaced during the Pulitzer deliberations. In interviews after this year's prize was awarded to Edward Albee's "Three Tall Women," the Pulitzer jurors spoke about two reasons for dropping Ms. Smith's new one-woman show, "Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992," from consideration. The language of the play is not invented but gleaned from interviews, they said, and the play is not reproducible by other performers because it relies for authenticity on the performer's having done those interviews. Regarding the latter claim, more than one juror said Ms. Smith had admitted this herself.

"I never, ever said other people couldn't do my work," Ms. Smith responded, pointing out that "Fires in the Mirror," a previous show created by the same method, has been performed by the Mixed Blood Theater, a group in Minneapolis, with a cast of four. "This work is meant to encourage a discussion of diversity. I want other people to do the acting, to experience what it is to be in somebody else's shoes. So to put the word out that my work is anything less than that is to diminish what it is at its very heart."

"As for 'she didn't write a word of it,' that's beside the point," Ms. Smith continued. "I deliberately positioned myself across from that kind of theater, that has a single voice. It's political, yes. It's anti-traditional, yes. But I feel we desperately need bigger voices. and that's why, you bet, I want fifth graders performing my work."

William A. Henry 3d, chairman of the Pulitzer jury, said: "What Anna had said to me was that doing the interviews was integral to performing the piece, that she couldn't imagine what it would be like to have someone else doing her work, and that it wouldn't be the same thing." On Ms. Smith's "writing" the play, he added: "Plainly it was a creative act. But it's not fiction." Trying to Lure Hollywood Actors

One familiar lament of New York theater producers is that when stage actors slip out to Hollywood, they're gone for good. So here's a new tactic meant to lure them back. James B. Freydberg, whose current Off Broadway project is Claudia Shear's one-woman show, "Blown Sideways Through Life," has leased the Coronet Theater, a 277-seat house in West Hollywood, with the idea of trying out new shows in workshop-length runs with film stars acting in them. The hope is they'll develop a taste for the project and stick with it.

Mr. Freydberg rented the Coronet briefly in 1992 and put on Garry Marshall's play, "Wrong Turn at Lungfish," starring George C. Scott and Tony Danza. Last year the play did, in fact, come to New York, with Mr. Scott and Mr. Danza.

Mr. Freydberg's plan is to alternate limited engagements of successful Off Broadway shows -- the first one is likely to be "Blown Sideways," which is to close in New York in July -- with workshops of new productions. The one would subsidize the other.

Of course, the gravy train runs both ways. "At this time, there's a good opportunity to make plays into films," Mr. Freydberg said. "Why not do them where those films are made?" John Heard Out of 'In Betweens'

John Heard has left the cast of "In Betweens," Bryan Goluboff's play scheduled for the Westside Theater. He has been replaced by D. B. Sweeney. Performances have been pushed back three weeks, until May 5.

Photo: "A One-Woman Stageful" -- Phyllis Yvonne Stickney, best known for character roles in films (she played Tina Turner's sister in "What's Love Got to Do With It"), brings a one-woman show, "Big Momma 'n 'Em," to the Joseph Papp Public Theater from May 20 to June 5. The show, featuring Ms. Stickney in the guise of a variety of women, replaces Danitra Vance's "Pre-Shrunk" on the Public schedule.